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The Maternamancer

AKA: Hags, Midwives

The future grows inside you. By hoarding your dynastic destiny, you use that kernel of unborn reality to collect the raw force of potential, giving birth to the world you prefer.Pregnancy is a mystical state in which a woman’s body becomes a vessel for more than just her own soul. When a woman is carrying her first child, the potential of all her possible descendents writhes and grows within her. Echoes of this power once blessed firstborns, for once they too contained within them the whole of their family’s destiny. The essence of the future flows into and through a mother-to-be like a river.

Maternamancy turns that river into a siphon, and allows the would-be-mother to channel life’s potential according to her will. The central paradox of this school involves childless motherhood, unfulfilled potential, and aborted dynasties. It has a strong synergy with the Devouring Mother, though having any descendants robs practitioners of their power. Most followers of this school discovered it on their own after an abortion, a miscarriage, or losing all their children.

MATERNAMANCY BLAST STYLE Maternamancy blasts manifest as disfiguring congenital birth defects: limbs become gnarled and uneven; palettes develop a cleft; vital organs become defective, or emerge to grow on the outside of the body. Unlike normal injuries, this damage can only be healed through surgery, not convalescence. However, the defects are relatively stable, so the character can ignore the time that passes between receiving a blast and undergoing corrective surgery. Fortunately, these blasts cannot be customized using Long Distance or Special Delivery (UA2, pg. 115).
STATS Generate Minor Charge: Eat menstrual blood (raw or prepared). Each period produced by a single woman, no matter how much blood is produced or consumed, provides a single charge.

Generate Significant Charge: Eat an aborted or miscarried fetus, (your own or someone else’s, raw or prepared).

Generate Major Charge: Eat your parents and all their descendants (except yourself, of course). That means any siblings you may have, nieces or nephews, etc. If they are already dead, you must eat their remains.

Taboo: You must both be pregnant and have no descendents. Early in the pregnancy, you may occasionally suffer a general -5% shift due to random nausea or hormonal swings. Taking a significant amount of damage, especially to the abdomen, may cause a miscarriage and force a Maternamancer to break her taboo.

Random Magick Domain: Potentials, vitality, emotions, and souls. Maternamancy is best at planting seeds and preventing them from taking root. It’s less useful for situations that have already come to pass, but it’s great at foreseeing problems and nipping them in the bud.

Starting Charges: A newly created Maternamancer is three weeks pregnant and has 4 minor charges.

Charging Tips: Get a job handling medical waste at an abortion clinic. Tampon disposal bags can provide an easy source of minor charges. You’ll have to blow your taboo before entering the third trimester if you want a professional abortion, so plan ahead and learn how to make artifacts quick.
MINOR FORMULA SPELLS The Cramps Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: Cause extreme pain around the reproductive organs (testes or ovaries). For the next two turns, any of the target’s actions that roll below the caster’s result will fail. This can be used to attack the Soul stat of insubstantial spirits or entities, inflicting damage as a minor blast.

Morning Sickness Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: Get a hunch about your own or someone else’s next action. Even if you have no idea what that action will be, you still get a gut feeling of how it’ll turn out.

Refresh Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: Channel the missed chance of life represented by the charge to heal an injury. Restore a number of wound points equal to the “ones” die to the target. This can also restore a Soul stat.

A Mother’s Eye Cost: 1 minor charge
Effect: See someone’s aura.

Fertile Mind Cost: 2 minor charge
Effect: Cause a thought to come up in someone’s head. This is limited to about a single sentence, but will be taken as the target’s own natural impression. This is useful for anything from making a security guard think “there’s nobody behind that desk,” to just assuring a good first impression. This is especially effective on demons, allowing you to give them a single de facto command. Each additional charge spent doubles the number of targets.

Womanly Wiles Cost: 3 minor charges
Effect: Cause an action to be re-rolled. The roll can have been a success or a failure. (If this spell is attempted after failed action by the caster, it does not count as an action.) You don’t have to designate the action immediately, but it must be used as soon as the cancelled roll is made. The caster cannot do anything else until she lets it loose. This spell can only affect actions that take place after the casting. If it isn’t used by the end of the scene, the effect is wasted.
SIGNIFICANT FORMULA SPELLS Postnatal Miscarriage Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: This is Maternamancy’s minor blast. If the caster has gained a significant charge from the target’s potential offspring, it can be turned into a significant blast. This can also be used to attack the Soul stat of insubstantial spirits or entities, inflicting damage as a significant blast.

Astral Conception Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: Create a demon-like entity that follows the caster’s commands. It is “demon-like” because it never got the chance to live and develop an ego or personality. It is more co-operative, but less useful than a true demon. It can be used as a spy, to cause minor unnatural phenomena, etc. but cannot teach rituals or provide insights. After about 9 months of being docile, it no longer follows instructions.

Bless/Curse Child Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: Bless or curse a child in the womb. The victim may never get sick or always be sickly, genius or retarded, strong or scrawny, good-looking or deformed, etc. In effect, the caster can add or subtract the result of the roll from a child’s future stats. Not much in the way of instant gratification, but it’s a hell of a thing to hold over someone’s head.

Vitality Cost: 1 significant charge
Effect: Channel the potential from an aborted child to strengthen an existing life. The target gets 5 points to distribute between Wound Points and Soul stat – the weak, developing life force of a child in the womb. Additional Wound Points do not heal wounds, but they do make existing injuries less significant. Also, Wound Points cannot be raised above twice the target’s Body stat, or raise a Soul stat above 85. It can also correct the lingering difficulties caused by surviving extreme wounds or extreme old age. It can even mitigate fatal wounds, if cast within 5 minutes of the target passing 0 wound points.

Barren Memory Cost: 2 significant charges
Effect: Prevent anyone from retaining memories of your further interaction after you leave. While still in your presence, people will continue to interact normally with you, but once you’re gone they will have no recollection of what transpired between you after the casting, or even that you were (still) there at all. This effect lasts until the next time you are alone. Anyone who realizes there is a gap in their memory may be subject to a Rank 2 Self stress check. Devices that would record the Maternamancer do not function while the spell is in effect.

This effect can also be focused on a single target. Although the victim will not feel any difference at the time, they will not be able to remember anything about what happens during the spell’s duration. The period of blacked-out memories extends from the moment the spell is cast until the next time the target is alone. Suffering this blackout may cause a Rank 2 Helplessness stress check.

Sound the Well of Souls Cost: 3 significant charges
Effect: Use an Avatar in your presence as a conduit for observing the Statosphere. You receive background information on that member of the invisible clergy, its relative influence, current interests, if it is in conflict with its godwalker, the nature of its channels, etc. This also works on people building new Archetypes, revealing the nature of their concept, how far along it is, and how much support it has in the collective unconscious. Repeating this spell on the same person costs only a single charge.

Reincarnate Cost: 4 significant charges
Effect: Cast out the waiting soul of an unborn child and substitute a demon instead. This spell is the ultimate bribe for dealing with demons, or rewarding your comrades; life as an infant usually quite comfortable. The demon is wise to be subtle and keep quiet about his new condition, because this spell doesn’t prevent the cruel ones from dragging him right back out, leaving the body comatose or dead from SIDS. This can also be attempted on a grown person with a soul stat below 35.
MAJOR EFFECTS Make it so someone was never born (with the usual restrictions on reality re-writes). Get a hunch about everything that happens to you, for the rest of your life. Make an entire extended family or village completely sterile, or extremely fertile. Vastly increase your recuperative potential, even healing to return after fatal injuries. Cause someone to reincarnate (complete with memories) in newborns until the end of the world. Implant a demon in every unborn child in a city. Comprehend the Invisible Clergy. Be John Malkovich.
WHAT YOU HEAR: THE MATERNAMANCER Alice Woodward, a Midwife in Providence, RI has figured out a way to inject a soul into a nonentity. She’s been getting favors from demons in exchange for giving them some crime spree party-time in the soulless husk. She has only captured the one so far, but she’s looking for a female to see if they breed.

Adepts Menzoa |

6 thoughts on “The Maternamancer”

  1. Menzoa says:

    Another revision based on recent play-testing.

    Reply
  2. Menzoa says:

    Also, we found that it was very thematic to have spontaneous periods/miscarriages/pregnancies, and temporary hauntings by baby-demons as Unnatural Phenomena caused by Maternamancy effects.

    Reply
  3. Menzoa says:

    One of the characters has been using amniotic fluid to make significant artifact “potions,” and diluted menstral blood for minor ones.

    Reply
  4. Menzoa says:

    A loophole was found in the Major Charging rules. To close it, we decided that, since your own descendants were part of your personal potential to begin with, they don’t count for charging… but not eating their remains can prevent a charge.

    But to leave a plot door open, we decided you could generate a charge by eating your unborn child’s father and his whole family instead.

    Reply
  5. Menzoa says:

    Miniature Wicker Zombu posts a thematically appropriate unnatural creature: Fetus Swarms.

    Reply
  6. KriegsaffeNo9 says:

    This…. is awesome. Few things are as symbolically jarring as “motherhood” and “cannibalism.” JUXTAPOZE~! The next (…first) time I run a game, I’m gonna fit this baby in as the first BBEG.

    Reply

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